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Scherzo und Marsch, S177

Introduction

The Scherzo und Marsch is a work apart from the others: one of Liszt’s larger structures, it exploits the combination of two movements into one which is familiar from the and which reached its apogee with the Sonata. But the musical language of the Scherzo—in a very brisk 38, with its many barbed appoggiaturas—is a direct precursor of the Mephisto music: the Mephistopheles movement of the Faust Symphony (right down to the uncompromising fugal development) and the Mephisto Waltzes and Polka. The March, which is at once a new movement and a kind of trio section to the Scherzo, begins as a ghostly affair which presages the young Mahler and is denied its triumph by the shortened return of the Scherzo, only to reappear in diabolical glory at the furious coda. The neglect of this minor masterpiece is due to its severe technical demands; Liszt himself lamented that neither Kullak nor Tausig could bring the piece off in performance, and that only Blow had mastered it. (Typically, he never played it himself.) According to the Neue Liszt-Ausgabe the original incomplete draft of the work dates from 1851 and is subtitled Wilde Jagd (‘Wild Hunt’). The hunting title is not really appropriate to the character of the work, however, and Liszt put it to much better use in the eighth of the Transcendental Études. The work was finally published in the present form in 1854.

Recordings

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Leslie Howard’s recordings of Liszt’s complete piano music, on 99 CDs, is one of the monumental achievements in the history of recorded music. Remarkable as much for its musicological research and scholarly rigour as for Howard’s Herculean piano p ...» More

Described in the autograph as a ‘Concertstuck [sic] für das Pianoforte’, the Scherzo and March, dedicated to Theodor Kullak, court pianist to the King of Prussia, appeared in 1851. A hellish ‘night ride’ of extraordinary dimension and sustained originality, inflamed by a pianism of colossal, high speed, rhythmic athleticism (a relentless onslaught of brittle digital dexterity, or massive block and quasi trillo chords, of muscular double-octave thunder, all unleashed within a dynamic spectrum of pp to fff, and all directed towards the creation of a texture frequently bizarre in the Alkanesque spacing of its extremes), it belongs among the least familiar of the great Liszt epics. Physically exhausting, emotionally draining, re-creatively challenging, the enormity and terror of its pianistic universe are not for the faint-hearted: to survive its galvanic journey is to knowingly triumph over some of the most awesome difficulties in the entire history of Romantic piano technique. Like the 1838 version of the Transcendental Studies, what it documents, memorably, is a wholly new kind of energizing virtuosity.

Architecturally, Louis Kentner has observed (1970), the Scherzo (in D minor) – in the tradition of Beethoven’s Ninth, a work Liszt knew intimately – is in sonata form, prefaced by an introduction, ‘Allegro vivace, spiritoso’. More a seed-bed of atmospheric invocation than germinal melody, this introduction, whispered and mocking, is concerned broadly with a staccato left-hand figure of Second Concerto-like identity. Precisely delineated, on-going in elaboration, the main thrust of the exposition revolves around two principal subject groups. The first of these, macabre and underlined by an unrelieved mood of nocturnal hellishness, polymetrically juxtaposes material in 2/4 and 6/8; the second, arrestingly unisonal, is in the dominant minor. Preceded by an exegesis combined of elements drawn from the second subject and introduction, the development section, a scena of cinematically diabolonian encounter, dwells amid fantasies of burgeoning spectral shape and sound. Opening with a flashback to the introduction (by now an important signpost) and punctuated by ‘presto strepitoso’ episodes of malignant Mephistophelian laughter, its substance is established by fragments of the first subject (in B minor) offset by an angular fugal interpolation anticipative in many ways of things to come in the sonata and the Faust Symphony. For musico-dramatic reasons, the recapitulation, heralded by a prestissimo re-transition, is curtailed.

The central March, ‘Allegretto moderato’, is in B flat, but it’s an adulterated B flat, coloured by an insistent minorially flattened sixth that intonationally is to the immediate context what B flat tonally is to the whole. Liszt gives us a magnificently idiomatic and personal vision, a grand march of the spirit. True, his models are discernible. On the one hand, Beethoven: the key and style of the ‘Alla marcia’ variation from the Ninth’s finale. On the other, Weber: the crescendo by repetition, the climax, the sudden decay of the march from the Konzertstück (an old repertoire stomping ground). But what he does with his material is unique to himself: for example, how he excites sudden shifts of key – from B flat mp to B flat ff by way of G flat, D flat, E, D and C sharp, plus some inevitable augmented triad referencing – to create tension and impulsion. And how he re-harmonizes the March theme on its final fff marcatissimo appearance to set the whole instrument suddenly roaring in a resonance of clangorous, fearful tumult.

The final third of the work is occupied with a partial recapitulation of the Scherzo (a reprise of the first subject in D minor) and a closing coda-development in the Beethoven manner, ‘Stretta’, based on fragments from the March in conflict with the second subject of the Scherzo twisted into the tonic major (D) but with the flattened-sixth (now B flat) and flattened-second (now E flat) inflexion of its original minor key presentation retained. ‘It is’, Kentner says, ‘as if religion [the March (God)] were doing battle with the Devil [the Scherzo].’ This major/minor confusion is maintained right to the end. Even when D major seems to be unequivocally proclaimed, a B flat irritant makes sure that it isn’t quite.